The Mysterious Death of Father Georgiy Gapon
Father Georgiy Gapon is known to history as the man whose actions sparked the 1905 revolution against the Tsar and the Russian government, which had momentous effects. Not least of which is the fact that it brought Leon Trotsky to the fore of the revolutionary movement in Russia. (1)
Indeed had it not been for the events of Bloody Sunday caused by Gapon that served as the spark for the 1905 revolution. Then it is likely that the Russian Social Democratic Party (of which the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were factions) would not have come to power in 1917 and there would have been no Soviet Union, no Russian civil war and nobody would have ever heard of a certain Georgian named Joseph Stalin.
I have narrated and explained the events (and their jewish origin) of Bloody Sunday elsewhere, (2) but what I left out of that analysis is the rather odd way that their protagonist Father Georgiy Gapon met his maker.
After the events of Sunday 22nd January 1905 where between 130-200 workers were killed and close to 800 were injured. (3) Gapon was sheltered by Maxim Gorky before making an abortive attempt to prove to his more intellectual supporters that he was alive by attending a meeting of the Free Economic Society and from which he was forced to flee after having been recognized and that recognition having caused a localized riot. (4)
Gapon then fled via Finland to Geneva in Switzerland arriving in late January. There he met up with Lenin (on whom he had a significant intellectual impact) (5) and the assorted luminaries of the Russian Social Democratic Party in exile. Although this heavily jewish clique cold-shouldered Gapon by enlarge; Lenin was a notable exception and spent hours in deep conversation with the fugitive priest. (6)
After tiring of being treated like a pariah by self-styled (and oft jewish) revolutionaries in Geneva. Gapon moved to England where he befriended the anarchist luminaries Prince Pyotr Kropotkin and Rudolf Rocker while he wrote a rather racy memoir of his life. (7) This certainly including a heavy acquaintance with the almost exclusively jewish clique that surrounded both Kropotkin and Rocker at the time as was ably described by Rocker's son Fermin in his memoirs. (8)
As an aside I will note that as Gapon describes his escape from Russia in his autobiography; it is primarily jewish families that he describes as having knowingly sheltered him and helped him to hide from the wrathful forces of law and order. (9)
Gapon evidently tired of his exile quickly and the fact that in Western Europe he was at most a curiosity and once the initial interest wore off; he was dumped on the social side-lines as yesterday's news. By December 1905 Gapon was back in Russia (10) and had resumed contact with the Okhrana (the Tsarist secret police); (11) in whose employ he had started out his life as a socialist agitator in the 'Assembly of Russian Factory Workers'. (12)
Much had changed during Gapon’s absence in England with Serge Zubatov having been replaced as head of the Okhrana by Pyotr Rachkovsky. (13) Rachkovsky however agreed to support Gapon’s renewed religious ministry in support of pro-Imperial socialism among the factory workers with a donation of 25,000 rubles if Gapon would held him put an end to the bloody terrorist campaign waged by the Socialist Revolutionaries against the Russian government and the supporters of the Tsar. (14)
What happened next is unclear, but what we do know is that Gapon (now again under the thumb of the Okhrana) either tried to convince his long-term friend and senior Socialist Revolutionary figure (as well as a businessman and ardent Zionist) Pinhas Rutenberg to become a police agent (15) or Rutenberg discovered that Gapon was sending messages to the Ministry of the Interior (i.e., the Okhrana). (16)
We know for a fact that Rutenberg then told Evno Azef - a senior leader of the Socialist Revolutionaries, a member of its five-member Central Committee as well as head of the Socialist Revolutionary Combat Organization as well as a police informant in his own right - what he knew; Azef like Rutenberg was also jewish. (17)
Azef - who also happened to be an agent of the Okhrana - (18) then had Gapon detained by his revolutionary thugs, moved and subjected an unofficial trial and executed in Finland in early 1906. (19)
The mystery starts around Gapon’s death with some sources claiming he was predictably found guilty of attempting dismantle organizations he had helped create on the orders of the Okhrana (20) and then hanged in a hotel room in Finland on 10th April 1906. (21)
The problem with that is we are given an alternative date and place of execution by other sources within the Socialist Revolutionaries: a country house in the village of Ozerki on 26th March 1906. (22)
This is reflective of the greater mystery that surrounds Gapon's death which is twofold.
In the first instance we do not know for sure how Rutenberg knew that Gapon was a police agent. Of the two alternatives I tend towards the belief that Gapon attempted to recruit Rutenberg as this would be the only real way that Rutenberg could be sure that Gapon was a spy for the Okhrana, especially in the light of the fact that the latter had been an ardent revolutionary and Rutenberg's close personal friend for quite some time.
Evidence for this attempted recruitment and how Rutenberg knew Gapon was a police agent is found in the fact that Rutenberg met Pyotr Rachkovsky and A. Gerasimov (head of the St. Petersburg section of the Okhrana) with Gapon after which Rutenberg ran off to tell Azef that Gapon was a police agent. (23)
In the second instance we do not know why an agent of the Okhrana (Azef) instigated the hanging of another (Gapon).
This fact has caused Figes to rather absurdly style Gapon's death an 'execution' by the Okhrana. (24) What Figes ignores in this is that Gapon's execution was standard revolutionary discipline in those times and as such Azef was almost certainly not following the Okhrana's instructions, but rather his own instincts.
It is also absurd to think that Azef would have deferred to the Okhrana in such a matter as he was first and foremost a true-believing revolutionary who used his status as an Okhrana informer to protect himself from arrest so he could spread subversive ideas while being on the 'protected' list so-to-speak.
Figes also rather pointedly ignores the fact that the Social-Revolutionary intellectual and political leadership of this period and earlier was overwhelmingly jewish. (25)
However, I digress slightly; we know after being told about Gapon by Rutenberg that Azef promptly denounced Gapon to the Socialist Revolutionary Central Committee and demanded that Gapon be immediately ‘finished off like a viper’. (26) Other members of the Socialist Revolutionary Central Committee instead demanded Gapon be tried before he was executed. (27)
In the end the Central Committee agreed to use Gapon to lure Pyotr Rachkovsky and A. Gerasimov to another a meeting upon which Rutenberg was to arrange for them to be killed. (28) This was to be in revenge for the arrest of several Socialist Revolutionary leaders and the prevention of a terrorist assassination of Grand Duke Vladimir and several other senior government officials. (29)
Rutenberg failed to carry out this order for the Socialist Revolutionary Central Committee, but instead lured Gapon to a country house in the village of Ozerki on 26th March 1906 while a group of workers from Gapon-led organizations were within hearing in another room. Where Gapon was induced by Rutenberg to talk about his work with the police upon which the workers became absolutely enraged and rushed in and promptly lynched Gapon then and there. (30)
The story of the Gapon being hanged in a hotel in Finland given later by Azef may be reconciled with this other account when we realise that there are at least three candidates for the village of Ozerki near the Finish border and that the ‘country house’ may have either functioned as a hotel or Azef’s use of the term ‘hotel’ may be in the older French sense of a paid place of residence rather than the mass accommodation we are inclined to think of today.
We cannot however reconcile the month or so differences between the dates given but it doesn’t mean much for our purposes as they are only 15 days apart.
The real question is why did Rutenberg disobey the orders of the Socialist Revolutionary Central Committee?
Ruud and Stepanov argue – not unconvincingly – that the reason Rutenberg disobeyed the Socialist Revolutionary Central Committee was Azef.
Azef likely saw Gapon as a threat and as a rival police informant may have believed that Gapon knew his identity and as such was a danger to his life as well. (31)
If Azef allowed Gapon to be tried by his fellow Socialist Revolutionaries then he may well have been very concerned that Gapon might expose his own role as a police informant within the Socialist Revolutionaries if he was aware of it in order to save his own (i.e., Gapon’s) skin. If Rutenberg simply had Gapon murdered – albeit in a melodramatic way that did in some ways function as a trial if a very irregular one – then this would neatly solve Azef’s problem.
As it happens Azef had previous form for doing just this.
The jewish Socialist Revolutionary Maximalist (i.e., a terrorist working for Azef in the Socialist Revolutionary Combat Organization) named Solomon Ryss managed to independently unearth Azef’s connection to the police when M. I. Trusevich – the director of the police – revealed it to him, while in prison in the hope of gaining a reliable informant inside the Socialist Revolutionary Combat Organization. (32) Azef promptly arranged for the Okhrana to have Ryss arrested and promptly hanged to protect himself from exposure. (33)
What that means in summary is that Gapon - in spite of being an ardent philo-Semite - (34) was tried and executed by a kangaroo court of primarily jewish left-wing terrorists. That is the fact of the matter and attempting to blame the Okhrana is absurd, because the blame for Gapon's extrajudicial hanging has to lie almost exclusively with leadership of the Social-Revolutionary Party who were overwhelmingly jewish. (35)
References
(1) Robert Service, 2009, 'Trotsky: A Biography', 1st Edition, MacMillan: Basingstoke, pp. 86-95
(2) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/father-georgiy-gapon-and-the-jewish
(3) Nicholas Riasanovsky, 1993, 'A History of Russia', 5th Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, p. 407; http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/%E2%80%98bloody-sunday%E2%80%99-st-petersburg
(4) Orlando Figes, 1997, 'A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924', 1st Edition, Pimlico: London, p. 178; Georgy Gapon, 1906, 'The Story of My Life', 1st Edition, E.P. Dutton: New York, pp. 206; 210-212
(5) Robert Service, 2000, 'Lenin: A Biography', 1st Edition, MacMillan: Basingstoke, pp. 8-9
(6) Ibid., p. 172
(7) Figes, Op. Cit., p. 178
(8) Fermin Rocker, 1998, 'The East End Years: A Stepney Childhood', 1st Edition, Freedom Press: London, pp. 91-96
(9) Gapon, Op. Cit., pp. 235-236
(10) Figes, Op. Cit., p. 178, n. ; Charles Ruud, Sergei Stepanov, 1999, ’Fontanka 16: The Tsars’ Secret Police’, 1st Edition, McGill-Queen’s University Press: Montreal, p. 141
(11) http://novaonline.nvcc.edu/eli/evans/HIS242/Notes/Gapon.html
(12) Riasanovsky, Op. Cit., p. 407; Robert Service, 2003, 'A History of Modern Russia: From Nicholas II to Putin', 2nd Edition, Penguin: New York, p. 13
(13) Ruud, Stepanov, Op. Cit., p. 141
(14) Ibid.
(15) Ibid.; http://novaonline.nvcc.edu/eli/evans/HIS242/Notes/Gapon.html
(16) http://spartacus-educational.com/RUSgapon.htm
(17) Ibid.; http://novaonline.nvcc.edu/eli/evans/HIS242/Notes/Gapon.html; Jonathan Daly, 2004, ‘The Watchful State: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1906-1917’, 1st Edition, Northern Illinois University Press: Dekalb, p. 22
(18) http://novaonline.nvcc.edu/eli/evans/HIS242/Notes/Gapon.html; Daly, Op. Cit., p. 22
(19) Daly, Op. Cit., p. 22; Ruud, Stepanov, Op. Cit., p. 142; Service, 'Lenin', Op. Cit., p. 221
(20) https://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/g/a.htm
(21) http://spartacus-educational.com/RUSgapon.htm
(22) Ruud, Stepanov, Op. Cit. p. 142
(23) Ibid., p. 141
(24) Figes, Op. Cit., p. 178, n.
(25) Erich Haberer, 1995, 'Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth Century Russia', 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York, p. 272
(26) Ruud, Stepanov, Op. Cit., p. 141
(27) Ibid., p. 141-142
(28) Ibid., p. 142
(29) Daly, Op. Cit., p. 21
(30) Ruud, Stepanov, Op. Cit., p. 142
(31) Ibid.
(32) Ibid., pp. 142-143
(33) Ibid., p. 142
(34) Gapon, Op. Cit., pp. 115-116; 250-252
(35) Haberer, Op. Cit., p. 272